I really hope Google discontinues this project soon (that’s kind of their specialty). I find it frustrating when chatbots/LLMs adopt real names as their brand identities.
This still doesn't work for me. I have to actively think about the problem, find a solution, and write the code myself. Outsourcing these efforts makes my learning ineffective.
I will keep using LLMs for 1 week greenfield hobby projects that I don't plan to revisit. But no matter how good LLMs get, I will never use them in my dailyjob, otherwise, I risk losing touch with the codebase.
> in some languages like French natives basically refuse to speak to you
I've never seen this happen, but I do notice a lot of tourists asking for services or starting conversations without saying 'hello' or 'bonjour,' which is considered disrespectful in France
> The speed run of the French engineer is to be admitted to a good engineering school, to be recruited on diploma in a large state body, to spend 3-5 years there with a low salary but great responsibility, to be recruited by a Swiss or American company, profit.
Your comment is on point, though I’d slightly adjust the part about French engineers career goal. From my experience, many French engineering peers were not even aware that companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500) could offer six-figure salaries. They also often have never heard of leetcode/system design/behavioral interviews. They assume their career trajectory depends almost entirely on the ranking/prestige of their engineering school (which is true for french companies), but in practice, most U.S. recruiters/companies don’t even know what a French engineering school is. A bachelor/master degree and a good grind on leetcode is enough for them.
For most students I studied with, the dream is to secure a 45K~50k salary right after graduation, and target 80k as an end-of-career goal, by following this path:
> French engineering peers were not even aware that companies in France (Big Tech or Fortune 500) could offer six-figure salaries.
I know senior engineer at Airbus who don't earn six-figure salaries.
French human resources are cowards and hide behind diplomas to justify pay scales and recruitment. “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM“/”Nobody gets fired for recruiting a polytechnicien”.
I trained as a mechanical/nuclear engineer. It took destroying all the other competitors at my company's internal hackathon, Master Dev France and a project involving several thousand lines of python, for HR at my company to admit that I knew how to code without a software dev diploma.
This seems to be the case for most European countries, particularly here in France. We’re experiencing stagnation, or perhaps even a decline. Launching a product in Europe is significantly more challenging due to the market’s high fragmentation.
I don’t have much hope for the future of tech companies in Europe.
It’s exhausting trying to explain this to American leftists. They believe the UK / EU is rich, their healthcare is amazing and “free”, and no one has to work more than 35 hours a week. They visit London and Paris once in 10 years for vacation and think they understand the economic order.
European corporations and political class are rich and benefit from high GDP stimulated by mass migration and foreign funds cornering the housing market.
But European salaries are stagnating and job security is dropping like a stone, while the cost of living is steadily rising. And public healthcare is getting terrible with months of wait for an appointment.
Spain is now used as example of a growing economy in EU but youth unemployment is high and rising and wages are peanuts compared to housing. A lot of native Spanish kids are just checking out. I guess the Spanish corporations and foreign investors are having a blast. And the boomers with their fat pensions and renting their real estate portfolio.
Of note, the same is happening even in China. I feel really bad for Gen Z.
American leftist discourse about Europe is always hilarious. Apparently someone forgot to tell them that the "free" healthcare just means that it is forcibly deducted from your pay and only "free" if you don't work (Free meaning the people who work pay for you). Also they forget to mention that the actual health care system is chronically understaffed and that you should avoid the hospital if at all possible and that you might wait months to see a specialist.
Car discourse is another very good one. Apparently Europeans just really hate cars and take bikes/busses everywhere. They seem to genuinely believe that the US is the only country in the world with a car culture.
You should understand that the American situation is, in fact, much worse than ours in many ways. For instance, the average American pays a 40% tax rate compared to our 25% once you account for healthcare.
Sounds like the non-existent British NHS where getting an appointment to see a doctor is about as likely as meeting the Loch Ness Monster for a spot of tea and crumpets.
Ironically when we were living in Ireland and my daughter was going to have to wait 16 months to get a suspicious growth checked for cancer it was the UK that made it possible for us to go to a private clinic near Belfast and have her checked in a week. And it still wasn't even expensive. Free healthcare isn't actually free if you die waiting.
It used to be the jewel in the crown of empire though.
Thatcher and the more recent 14 years of UK Conservative government seemed to have kicked it bloody and senseless like Alex and his droogs from the Korova Milkbar.
The NHS and the Empire don't really overlap. It was founded right at the end of the war, shortly before the UK started having to divest from its colonies, and of course it was never a thing in any of the non-UK colonies!
I often think the NHS was only founded as a result of the war, as an extension of the military and civilian healthcare needs for injury care. German bombers didn't respect the British class system.
Only the Conservatives? You think Blair, Brown, and now Starmer did great things for the country? Give me a break. The whole political class is rotten. And the upcoming "Reform UK" is a joke, to say the least.
> You think Blair, Brown, and now Starmer did great things for the country?
No, but apparently you think that I think that. Perhaps you might like to work through that again ...
Leaving the state of the UK as a whole to one side, the NHS was actively kicked like a dog prior to Blair who did at least stop kicking it and attempt to reverse the decline with some, albeit limited, success.
The problem is policy is oriented to growing GDP and not GDP per capita. Large corporations benefit from GDP growth and lower wages, so they incentivize the political class to grow the population artificially (wink-wink).
The other problem is the welfare state or just the state. So much graft and just living off printed money. It pushes out success. What percent of the UK is effectively civil servants or people receiving benefits? What percent are net takers? A lot
> The other problem is the welfare state or just the state. So much graft and just living off printed money. It pushes out success.
I see these uninformed comments all the time, and to be they suggest that the person in question has an intense ideological bent, but an aversion to evidence. As another commenter pointed out, a large amount of UK benefits spending (~£100bn) is on the state pension (the single largest benefit).
You are correct that there are a large number of economically inactive people in the UK (something like 20% of working-age people). We have had at least 50 years of government presupposing that the problem here is that these people are lazy, and a little stick will motivate them back to work. The mere fact that this has not worked (and we have tried it repeatedly) might suggest that the problem is a bit more complex than this.
One issue is that the general health of the population is very poor. Unfortunately, improving this is a very hard problem. I think people underestimate just how hard. If you could solve this, you would create hundreds of billions of pounds in value (I am not underestimating). Presumably some starting points would be working out how to lower the costs of fruit and vegetables and increase the cost of ultra-processed fast food. Not sure what else helps here. I would give this a read: https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=61595
The other problem is that there are no jobs for the people in question, so even if they want to work (or are heavily incentivised to do so) they are not able to. The government can create some employment for these people, but a better vocational training system might help here.
The graft and living off printed money I do see is mostly in housing – people in the UK love to own and rent out houses. This means that (compared to e.g. Germany/Switzerland/Austria) there are very weak protections for renters. Additionally, when house prices are really high it makes it very challenging to build industries on top of this.
> Presumably some starting points would be working out how to lower the costs of fruit and vegetables and increase the cost of ultra-processed fast food.
Britain has implemented a sugar tax, but I despair when even a right-wing governments attempt to make walking and cycling easier falls victim to culture war nonsense.
Most of the benefits bill in the UK is paid to people who receive the the state pension
Of the others it's split between those who don't earn enough from work i.e. their employers don't pay them enough to live on so those benefits are essentially subsidising companies
And the other large chunk is people who aren't fit to work, this increased as a result of Covid but also the underfunding of health / social care by the previous government
The civil service isn't that big but the largest influx of people was caused by Brexit and the need to duplicate many of the things that didn't need to be separate when part of the EU
The people who've been living off printed money as those with assets, almost all the gains from the cheap money supply over the last 15 or so years has gone to the well off
Well specifically for engineering-related products (both software and hardware).
How can you thrive and be competitive when your competitors in the far-east work for >60 hours per week with a solid ecosystem and generous support from the government?
I am specifically worried about the future of European engineering, unlike US you have much smaller capitals and moats. Many of the products are sustained mainly by legacy built by your predecessors.
If nothing changes then by next-generation most if not all would be devoured by chaebols, Asian Sovereign Wealth Funds, or American PEs. You'll have to work for >60 hours but they not you will enjoy the surplus. Take your poison.
A few here have commented on different aspects, and they have their part to play but I agree with you, market fragmentation is the scale killer.
From an outside perspective it might appear like Europe is a true single market like the US but it isn't. Scaling to a European level isn't impossible but it is difficult. Some of that will just be difficult to do anything about, language, different cultures, etc.
On the political side I'm sure there is plenty more the EU can do but I don't see the will.
Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes. The language barrier is just the cost of a translator. Is that cost prohibitively high in Europe? I hear a lot of explanations of why Europe has fewer tech companies than America, but they are almost never backed by statistics. The most obvious answer continues to be the Bretton Woods system, by which large amounts of money are funnelled into America, seemingly without reason. China inverts this flow by debasing its currency, and Europe does not.
> The language barrier is just the cost of a translator.
Is it?
> Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes.
Market fragmentation isn't about language fragmentation – the EU has no single market for services currently, which means if you want to launch a product EU-wide you are effectively launching a product in 27 different countries. There is some harmonization, but not much. If you launch a product in the US you have a large fully harmonized single market.
The most bizarre thing is that the loudest critics of EUs market fragmentation are usually the most aggressive blockers of integration that would mitigate these issues.
I'm a graphics developer, looking for a 6-month internship (in my final year of a master's degree in CS) in the field of GPU/graphics programming.
I previously created my own cross-platform 3D engine (GL/C++) and used it to create the game Exploration Craft, which has more than 55 million downloads across Android/iOS. And more recently, used it for the incoming game Spaceflight Factory on Steam (a factorio like game).
I'm interested to join, but I'm not doing it fulltime (I went back to uni to get a master degree).
As a side project I'm developing a factory game (conveyor belts/factories/insertors..) with some Spaceflight Simulation game mechanics [1]
I'm planning on releasing the full game this December, but the game is already not doing so well (only 4K wishlists. 12K is recommended for a successful launch)
I was working on a game part-time for 1 year. The game is mix of Factorio + Stardeus (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1358970/Cyber_Factories/).
After releasing an early demo on Steam, the game seemed to be of little interest to anybody (only 1300 wishlists after one year).
I had two publishers reaching to me, but their funding offers were too low for me to consider working full time on the game and ship a finished product (I would need 18 month fulltime to finish the game).
So due to a lack of interest from the audience, I just cancelled the project.
